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ASUS P5P43TD LGA 775 Intel P43 ATX Motherboard . This motherboard resembles its predecessor P5QL PRO except using DDR3. In test reports posted on Internet, Intel Quad processors with DDR3 showed almost the same performance as with DDR2 in most test categories. But if you are a software engineer, you may want to purchase this motherboard to save troubles buying an add-on PCI IO card for a printer port. Most old JTAG ICEs use the printer port. The application program of the JTAG ICE may not know how to drive the ICE via an add-on card.

Before buying this motherboard, I shopped around for 2 months in Taiwan electronic markets. P5QL PRO received great comments from many shops. Now P5P43TD seems continuing the excellent reputation. It is now adopted by many Taiwan small PC shops/chain-stores to assemble PCs for their customers.

Summary Of Results

Works fine with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) 64-bit.

Pre-Install

The first release of BIOS with default settings works just fine.

Installation Program

System was installed by booting from SATA DVD. 64-bit PC (AMD64) desktop CD was used.

Ethernet Driver

Ethernet worked fine right out of the box. Only tested on 100Mbit ethernet.

Video

This board has no on-board video. I used an nVidia 8400-based in the single PCIe 16x slot. Visual Effects were not tested.

Audio

AC97 audio worked out of the box. Rear-panel analog audio and coax S/PDIF rear-panel output were untested.

Other Components Used

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Socket LGA775, 2.83 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 12MB L2 Cache, 45nm (Retail Box) (BX80569Q9550)
• CPU Cooler: stock Intel cooler
• CPU Paste: on cooler
• Memory: 8GB, 4 sticks of A-DATA AD3U1333B2G9-R DDR3 U-DIMM 1333 128X8 2GB 9 - RETAIL

• Video: WinFast PX8400 GS 256MB Paladin

• Power Supply Unit: ACBEL ATX PS2 12V Power Supply - 12cm Fan, Intel ATX V.2.2, R8 POWER 525W

• Hard Drive: WD Caviar Green, SATA Hard Drives, 500 GB, 32 MB Cache, SATA 3 Gb/s
• DVD Drive: LG GH22NS40 SATA DVD-Writer

• Monitor: ViewSonic 17"

• tower case: Seventeam

Final Comment

Compared to my previous system, Intel 1.7GHz and 1.5GB of DDR266, running Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit, the new system runs much more smoothly. Main parts were running quite OK without any manual installation. On top of 64-bit Ubuntu as a host PC, I run 32-bit CentOS 5.3 as a guest OS so that I can use GNU cross toolchains prepared by other software vendors. Everything looks nice so far.